When we meet Mrs. Hayes, fanning herself outside of a small airport in San Bernardino, California, she clearly isn’t a local. With her sensible flats and khakis and her awkward tourist t-shirt (courtesy of costume designer Jessica Ford), she sits alone on the cluttered and clumsy stage (set design by Wilson Chin), a lone human in a sea of metal siding. Lone save one, that is, a friendly cab driver of clear Mexican origins. Happy (Robert Montano) sweetly offers Elizabeth a coke, little knowing that he’s going to be giving her quite a bit more before she is done with him. You see, Elizabeth’s son was brutally murdered, and she’s come to find the only thing she still wants out of life. Closure.  And what does that have to do with Happy, you might ask? Far more than one might think, as it turns out.

Elizabeth hires Happy as her driver, to take her to San Bernardo Prison and Hancock detention center in an effort to confront the three people (all males) who beat her son to death. But Aaron, her ill-fated offspring, is no silent presence in this play. Played by George Olesky, and related entirely in a series of letters Aaron wrote but never sent to his mother, complete with flashbacks, we get a window into the life and soul of this troubled but spirited young man, and in theory, we fall in love with Elizabeth’s “beamish boy” as he discovers himself, and this country, among hives of bees and communities of migrant, mostly illegal, mostly Mexican farm workers. From each state and each new harvest Aaron chronicles his life and his journey of discovery, amazed at how much physical labor goes into each bite of fruit we eat. It should be beautiful and absorbing. It is my belief that it’s written to be beautiful and absorbing. But instead it’s at best irritating and at worst painful, and the blame for that can lie directly onto Olesky’s shoulders. Lock-jawed and stiff, Olesky is like a living example of everything bad male actors do. His hands flail with expression, his forehead furrows with painful concentration, he raises his voice and “emotes” for all he’s worth. He is clearly working hard. And it’s really not working.

And it’s a shame, because the central story is actually a beautiful one. A mother in the throes of grief, desperate to find some trace of her child still left in the world, finds a connection, tenuous, awkward and tense, but real, with the last friend had. He’s an illegal immigrant, a taxi-driver, a father of two. She’s a congressman’s daughter, a doctor’s wife, an Ivy-leaguer’s mother. But they share something no one else in the world does, and it bonds them in a rare and beautiful way. It’s messy, but life is messy, and the langauge Lin uses to tell his story is both lyric and bold, colloquial and special.  The playwright takes on quite a bit with this narrative, seeking to weave the threads of family, anti-Mexican sentiment, the politics of food and farming, loss and the culture of bees , all into one coherent whole. He uses flashbacks and monologues, two devices that don’t necessarily work as well as one might hope in guiding the narrative and enriching the story, despite the talents of Stepen Novelli, Laura Giknis and a lovely Joseph Michael O’Brien; each one brings life and color to their brief moments onstage.  And while each aspect of this story may not get the attention it deserves, the center of the story is a beautiful and moving one.

Moreover, Scallon and Montano are excellent with each other. Scallon, brittle, wry and deeply fundamentally damaged, wears her pain on her sleeve and in her expressive eyes, while Montano, charming and wise, but possessed of his own rage and pain, matches and compliments her. Together they carve true intimacy and depth out of this story, so marred with an impotent Aaron and a cluttered and inelegant set.  Chin’s set is distracting and limiting, shortening the playing space into a third of what it could be and scattering the walls with neon signs which do little to add more than garish icing to the metal walls. The actors are crowded by the world around them, unable to move freely, and though the initial reveal of a meadow is nice, it soon becomes tiresome when you realize how much space it eats up. And it’s a shame, because otherwise the design is quite nicely done. Joshua Shuman’s lighting is perfectly effective while Toby Algya’s sound is neat and nicely done. Ford’s costumes are nicely evocative without being obvious, and, set aside, everything else is nicely toned and well wrought. It’s just a shame that the world in which it lives is so overwhelming. Maybe it’s just that director Jackson Gay’s vision of this world isn’t entirely clear. Paired down and spare, this could be a world of infinite locations and spaces. As it is, it’s filled with unnecessary things that only get used once and haunt the space like a bad horror film.

But it’s worth seeing the show just to see Scallon and Montano travel through their respective, unbearably powerful arcs. Watching them together, the rest of the production just falls away, and we are left with two wounded people working to comfort each other through a dark and painful journey. We aren’t bees, we aren’t divided into workers and queens. Instead we are all equal, really, once we look past the superficial differences like country of origin. We all feel the sharp pain of losing love, the lack of it in our lives once it’s been obliterated. And we can all comfort each other, when it comes down to it. We just have to want to see past the obvious and to the heart of the matter.

People’s Light and Theatre Company’s production of Fallow will be running from now until the 5th of February. Tickets are available here.

Well, kind of. Sometimes. On rare occasions. If you are lucky. Because here is the truth, as one former undergraduate sees it, the more we talk about sex and sexuality, the more complicated it seems to become. Now, I’m of the opinion that sexuality has always been this complicated, and we are only noticing this now because it’s more socially acceptable to voice one’s discomfort and concerns, rather than repress them. Still, if any place is a safe place, it ought to be a college campus, where learning is respected and exploration is encouraged. Right? At least, that’s the supposition we arm ourselves with at the start of Annie Baker’s Body Awareness, currently running at the Wilma Theater.

So what do we do when, in an effort to make people feel comfortable with their sexuality and sense of self, we jeopardize our own? All of Annie Baker’s works thus far have been set in a Vermont of her imagination, and this one blends Middlebury with every other small liberal arts college in the Northeast to create one super-politically correct rural hipster school, soaked in New England charm and awkward silences. It’s Body Awareness Week at Shirley College, a mythical school in Vermont filled with eager young students ready to debunk heternormative expectations and really get to know themselves. At least, that’s what psychology professor Phyllis (Grace Gonglewski) is hoping. But while the campus hums with visions of Palestinian refuge camp dance troupes and folk music duos, all is not as idyllic in Phyllis’ home life. Her girlfriend of three years, Joyce (Mary Martello) is having some issues with her son, Jared (Dustin Ingram). Problems like he threatens to kill her when he gets annoyed, has trouble relating to other human beings, and pays too much for porn (seriously, has this guy not heard about the internet?). In short, physiologist Phyllis is convinced that Jared has Asberger’s syndrome, and given that he can define empathy word-perfect (he thinks the dictionary is a fun read) but can’t actually empathize, she might just be right. But it isn’t until free-wheeling Frank Bonitatibus(Christopher Coucill) comes into town, a guest artist for Body Awareness week who takes nude photos of women of all walks of life, that things really come to a head. But hey, isn’t deep emotional trauma what college is all about?

For such a young playwright, Annie Baker already commands a lion’s share of street cred. So it’s interesting to look at this work, her first, in the limited frame of her two other plays. Baker is lucky enough, and talented enough, to do something before the age of 30 that most writers struggle with through their whole careers, and that is, she has a style that is distinctive and instantly  recognizable. When you see an Annie Baker play, you are going to get some awkward silences. A lot of awkward silences. You are in for a lot of stuttering, a frank and colloquial style of dialogue, unpretentious and spattered with “um” and “yeah”. She doesn’t do lofty, and she doesn’t do grand. Instead we get the unfinished sentences and grasping at straws that so haunt the human experience. We also get some reference to Judaism, which I personally would be very interested to know what the reason for that is (as a pedestrian of the red sea, I get very interested when anyone talks about my fellow tribe members. It’s genetic). And in director Anne Kauffman’s capable hands, Baker’s trademarks and quirks are treated with love and kindness, because, as Phyllis says, “We all want to see ourselves without feeling seen. Or feel seen, without feeling judged”. Paced exquisitely well and cleanly, this production gives this story a neatly elegant world in which to live. Mimi Lien’s crisp and clear set design neatly delineates three separate spaces on the stage, making the interior of Joyce and Phyllis’ home and the classroom of Shirley college two distinct but related worlds. Thom Weaver’s lighting warms and sweetens the stage, while Rosemarie McKelvey’s simple but effective costumes instantly signify what kind of people each one of these characters are. And Robert Kapolowitz’ unobtrusive sound design rounds out the creative team, achieving a totality and effectiveness of design that we should get to see everywhere, but rarely do.

And then there is, of course, the cast. Baker is not, strictly speaking, an actor’s playwright. She can be a bit mean, as it turns out, forcing actors to live in silence (heaven forbid), making them make independent choices, wanted the comedy to emerge from natural human interaction, I mean, the woman is rather cruel, really. Making actors actually work and form real subtexual relationships? Having a world of communication going on beneath the surface of the text? How antiquated of her. Female writers are just the worst. That being said, this phenomenal cast acquits themselves well when confronted with all these challenges. Gonglewski is just fantastic as Phyllis, awkward and indignant and self-righteous and wry. She struts and frets her hour on the stage, joined by the magnificent Martello, who is warm and sweet and equally endearing when she is vainly attempting to discipline her son or crying over the shabbat candles (kindled on a Tuesday, but who’s counted) or giggling over the idea of posing naked. Moreover, these two actresses have more chemistry then most heterosexual couples one sees in real life. They cuddle, they bicker, they scream, but they compliment each other, and while we can thank Baker for that, we can also thank these two talented women for making it work. And then there are the men. Ingram’s Jared is just lovely, painfully awkward and funny, frustratingly troubled but completely understandable, even if he understands next to nothing about other people. And Coucill does an admirable job with a character that Baker doesn’t seem to have fully flushed out, giving his hippie habits a sense of depth and focus not inherent in the text. All together, these four people are a joy to watch, and one can’t help but feel a sense of harmony and safety when they enter the stage. You can trust these people, they are going to get the job done. It’s relaxing, in a delicious way, as much as it is exciting. You can depend on the cast, with Kauffman’s direction, to both soothe and surprise you. It’s like a spa mixed with an obstacle course.

If one can levy a criticism against Baker’s first play, it is that she bites off rather more than she can chew. Frankly, this play bites off rather more than any one play could chew. Gender norms, relationship issues, the purpose of art, the value of language, coming of age, concepts of family and parenthood, sexuality, sense of self, the politics of disabilities, all these things and more and covered in this play. And as a result, none of them get to really be unpacked the way one might wish. The intricacies of Joyce and Phyllis’ relationship, the insecurities associated with the fact that one of them (Joyce) only turned to women from men fairly recently and that she still seems to desire male attention, or at least, male company, all of these issues are addressed but not explored within the world of the dramatic narrative. Jared’s relationship with Frank, while touching, isn’t necessarily backed by any narrative continuity, and Frank, the outsider, the visitor, the most interesting narrative device that Anton Chekhov made a part of our modern understanding of theatrical convention, is hilarious and heartfelt, but less of a total human then a device.

That being said, there is no play that is so perfect that it lives without a single flaw. And while Baker’s first play may not end up being her absolute best, it’s still a generous and hilariously sweet examination of the way we think about ourselves, and the way we think about the people we love. And all of us could afford to spend a few hours thinking about both of those things. So if you are interested, The Wilma Theater’s Body Awareness runs from now until February 5th. Buy tickets here.

So it’s no wonder that Noel Coward’s best known couple, Amanda and Elliot of Private Lives (produced by the Lantern Theater Company)  have quite a bit in common. The pair (played by Genevieve Perrier and Ben Dibble, respectively) are both witty, wry, hot-tempered and ethically lax, more inclined to debate about cravats and caviar then concern themselves with petty morals. After all, it’s just so bourgeoisie, don’t you think? So when this divorced but never really separated couple find itself alone together on a balcony in France (like you do, #firstworldproblems), it’s only natural that after a little banter (foreplay) and a drink or two they find themselves slipping away together to Amanda’s love nest. It’s just a shame they leave behind  Elliot’s shrewish kewpie-doll new wife, Sibyl (K.O. DelMarcelle) and Amanda’s sweet and stodgy patronistic new husband, Victor (Leonard Hass). But oh, well, what’s a little spouse switching between friends? After all, this is France.

But is the spark between Amanda and Elliot sustainable, or is it the equivalent of a take out dinner in styrofoam containers, delicious and rather sinful, but unhealthy and wasteful? Well, the answer is yes, really, or at least that seems to be what Kathryn MacMillan’s production is telling us. Amanda (flawless and fun in the hands of the consummately excellent Perrier) and Elliot (whose comedic timing is perfect but whose debonair charm could use some work) are like a much more restrained Sid and Nancy, or a much more violent Fred and Ginger, take your pick.  Because no sooner do the lovebirds reunite then they start fighting, first with nitpicking and bickering, then with physical altercations and hurled insults, and no number of “safety words” or cigarettes seems to do much good. Can they make it work? Should they even try? And that’s pretty much what happens in Private Lives. Oh, and there is a French maid (Jessica Bedford), who enters in the third act to cast a Gallic eye of disapproval over these silly Anglicans. We don’t really need her, but then, what would the upper classes be without the help?

Like most modern Comedies of manners, it’s low on plot and high on dazzlingly sharp one-liners and well crafted social commentary. And it’s given a lovely production by the Lantern, glowing in Thom Weaver’s warm lighting design and neat but sumptuous with Meghan Jones’ demurely tasteful set design and Mark Mariani’s stunning costumes. From Amanda’s knockout emerald day dress (complete with matching hat! Why doesn’t anyone wear hats anymore?) to Victor’s oh-so-tweedy traveling suit, from Sibyl’s caplet to Louise the maid’s shabby chic ensemble, each outfit flatters and fits the piece perfectly. With the smokey sounds of Christopher Colucci’s sound and Coward’s original compositions haunting the room, one almost feels transported back to a time when music was sweeter, people dressed for dinner, and smoking was good for you. Ah, those were the days.

Plus there are, of course, several fascinating and frustratingly intriguing characters. Amanda is very much a modern woman, she drinks, she smokes, she enjoys a suntan and a healthy amount of extra-marital intercourse. Whats more, she knows herself, and she knows what she wants. Of course, what she wants changes from day-to-day, but she knows that too. And she’s more than a match for Elliot, whose slick surface barely covers his vulnerable interior. The reality is that it is Elliot, not Amanda, who is the true romantic here, traveling the world in solitude after their first marriage dissolved, pining for her from across the world. But Coward is just chock full of these subtle role reversals and comments on gender politics in modern society. As Amanda and Elliot battle and spar, then kiss and make up, the undercurrents of their relationship mirror those of polite society of the time. As they bicker:

Elliot: It doesn’t suit woman to be promiscuous

Amanda: It doesn’t suit you for women to be promiscuous.

One has only to look at the difference between Amanda and DelMarcelle’s deliciously irritating Sibyl (while it’s fairly frequently that I want to reach out and slap someone, this is the first time I’ve had to actively force myself not to do so, which is a good thing, because that’s that character’s entire reason for existing) and we see what fascinates Elliot about Amanda. She is her own person, and therefore she is forever beyond his reach. It’s bound to cause them both no end of problems, but if the entirely unsurprising ending of this play is any indication, these crazy kids would rather be miserable with each other than mildly happy but mostly bored with someone else. The opposite of love isn’t hate, really, it’s indifference. And the last thing Elliot and Amanda are is indifferent.

Even Noel Coward, who has given us some of the best comedic female characters of modern theater, can’t be as even-handed as one might wish. After all, Haas’ excellently played Victor is stuffy and British in the extreme (which is great for hunting parties and stiff upper lips, but less so for amour) is at least a kind and gentle person, someone we pity for having gotten caught up in the wake of Amanda and Elliot’s train wreck romance. Sibyl is afforded no such tolerance, she’s a shrew and a smug idiot and we, like Victor, are desperate to shake her. But how much more interesting, more complex and complicated would it have been to have Amanda and Elliot pick second partners who were both better for them, in terms of the day-to-day, the nuts and bolts of existence. Why couldn’t they both marry people who were legitimately strong options, but just not people they could actually in some way love? It seems clear that in her own way, Amanda loves Victor. Elliot couldn’t possibly love Sibyl. And not just because her name is Sibyl. Though I’m sure that’s at least some consideration.

But one has to wonder, are we even supposed to think about silly things like equality and socially enforced gender roles, or are we supposed to laugh at the jokes, smile at the love story, and walk away drunk on banter? Can we help doing one and not the other? Even in Coward’s comedic apex, these issues remain a clear part of the story, and to not consider them is to ignore the basis of this work, that is, society. Comedy points a finger at society no less so than tragedy, it simply choose to do so in a more subtle way. After all, what would you prefer, reading a textbook or checking out Feminist Ryan Gosling?

Private Lives has finished its wildly successful champagne bubble of a run, but maybe if we ask nicely they will do it again, after all, that’s an option now. At the very least, you will be sure to catch this piece playing somewhere sometime soon. It’s a classic for a reason.

And that is a problem, though, sadly, not the only one, facing Matthew Lopez’s play, The Whipping Man, currently playing at the Arden Theatre Company. Set in the Ante-Bellum South (and by ante I do mean immediately ante, almost per, if you know what I’m saying), this story begins, as so many do, with a homecoming. Caleb (Cody Nickwell), a confederate solider, arrives home to find his childhood home (mansion) in tatters and his family fled. All that remains are splintered floorboards, dusty drapes, and, oh, yeah, two former-slaves, Simon (Johnnie Hobbs Jr.) and John (James Ijames).  And after a quick amputation (Caleb’s leg, gangrene is such a downer) and some playing catch up, the motley crew settles down to enjoy a nice Passover seder. Oh, did I not mention that this is a Jewish household, so all the slaves have been raised as Jews? As Liz Lemon would say, twist!

And that’s not the only one stuffed into this story like clowns in a tiny car. We’ve got race (duh), the assassination of president Lincoln, the forging of black identity post-slavery, illegitimate mixed-race children (as in, more then one), baby-mama drama, army desertion, and war torn star-crossed sweethearts. Given that this play takes place over only a few days, that’s pretty impressive, really. Nickwell’s Caleb, who is rendered immobile by his home-made amputation in the first scene, lays, swaddled in blankets and soothed by whiskey, in the center of his ramshackle palace, moaning in a Southern accent. Around him Hobbs, Jr.’s wise and weary Simon tries to instill some sense of morality in this world turned upside down while still asserting his newly-freed rights. Ijames’ John has a different motive in mind, seeking to torture Caleb, blaming him for the past beatings inflicted on John by the titular Whipping Man. John, an educated salve, confronts Caleb with their shared religion, reminding him that the Torah states that the Israelites can only take as slaves non-Jews. But when John realizes that the following day is in fact the first night of Passover, the holiday in which Jews celebrate the liberation from our bondage in Egypt, Simon decides that despite the fact that they have no food, no wine, no seder plate and no supplies, a seder is in order. And at this Last Supper these three men must confront the past and the scars it has left on each one of them. And on our broken nation. Like you do. And to think, my family just gets drunk.

Played in the Arden’s more intimate Arcadia Stage, this production has the benefit of really solid design and clear and committed acting. David P. Gordon’s set looks like it has been ripped right out of a Savannah home, crumbling with age but still stately, while Thom Weaver’s lighting keeps the tones dark and the feeling ominous. Christopher Colucci’s sound design is nice and neat, unobtrusive when it needs to be and sweetly melodic in the scene breaks. Alison Roberts’ costumes date the piece nicely and give it that Civil-War era charm you usually only find in historic reenactments.  And the trio onstage work beautifully together, finding human and humanity in even the least interesting dialogue and working hard to make the oddly jerky narrative smooth and natural. Nickwell is appropriately tortured, Ijames is sharp and wounded, and Hobbs. Jr. elevates his kosher Uncle Tom-style role to something that is actually sympathetic and interesting to watch. It’s just a shame that all of these well crafted elements only serve to highlight the deep-seated issues in this script.

Putting aside the probability that any freed slave really would have stuck around his former master’s abode and the fact that Jews made up less than 2% of the slave owners of the American south (so the concept of an all Jewish all slave-owning town in Georgia strains the imagination), the truth is that there are some interesting philosophical questions being asked by this story. But they are asked so badly, and sandwiched between such trite dialogue that, even this amazing cast of actors and group of designers and the herculean efforts of director Matt Pfeiffer, can’t selvage much from this wreckage.  The issues of race and religion, hypocrisy and our responsibility to our fellow human beings, the crimes we’ve committed in the name of progress and the rights we’ve assumed over other people because we thought we could, all these things resonate deeply in the consciousness of United States citizens, or, at least, they should. But instead of presenting hard truths in a real way, Lopez gives the audience a telenovela, a virtual buffet of plot twists that become, in his hands, clichés. Instead of a cumulative effect we feel as though we’ve been submerging in a landslide of events, none of which, as it turns out, actually end up mattering to us. It’s one thing to examine history and it’s legacy through a play. It’s another to pile on event after event in the hopes that one of them might actually impact  the audience, and think that including slavery is enough for a dramatic narrative or a well made play. Important historic events do not an important piece of theater made, and while it’s vitally important for playwrights to continue to create work which examines our understanding of history and our responsibility to those whose lives have passed but whose stories live on, somehow Lopez has managed to make a play about black Jewish ex-slaves confronting their former owner feel irrelevant, soapy and unimportant. Ultimately, we are left feeling like both we, and American history, have somehow been used.  Which isn’t exactly the goal for a play about the United States in 1865, now, is it?

The Arden Theatre Company’s production of The Whipping Man is playing until December 18th. Tickets are available here.

Methought I heard a voice cry, sleep no more. Macbeth does murdered sleep. And so he does, in that so famous play, by everyone’s favorite English playwright of the late 16th to early 17th centuries (ha, take THAT, Ben Jonson). Because as soon as that fatal act that both fulfills and defies fate has been accomplished,  the world of Macbeth says goodbye to shut-eye. And given what we know about the human brain when deprived of its so precious REM cycles, is it really surprising that the guy ends up with his head on a stick? No one makes rational decisions when they are sleepy. Some of us indulge in internet shopping. Some of us comfort ourselves with food. And some of us destroy the stability of an entire country all for the sake of a heavy metal hat, and all it represents. To each their own.

As any high school English class will teach you, William Shakespeare’s Macbeth is an environmental play. This doesn’t, of course, mean that the secret message of the work is “don’t kill people to get ahead, do recycle”. It means that this play is as much about place as it is about people. It’s about what is natural and unnatural, it’s about the relationship between humans and the natural order of things, and the consequences of cutting the line, disturbing that balance. It’s also a story that creates an environment of its own, an atmosphere of terror and destruction. And it is in this respect that many productions of this so produced play fail.

Which is not to say that these productions are failures. It’s just that this is a rare and difficult challenge for any production.  Because how do we appropriately convey that the world around us is caving in to an audience that is sitting comfortably in their seats? Or even one that is standing, jeering and squirming, as most evidence suggests the majority of Shakespeare’s audiences were when this play was first produced? It’s difficult to make people paranoid when they feel like they are watching, and not witnessing. But it seems fairly clear that the Scotland Shakespeare depicts under the yoke of its Mad Monarch is a land revolting upon itself:

Alas, poor country! /Almost afraid to know itself. It cannot/Be call’d our mother, but our grave; where nothing, /But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile; /Where sighs and groans and shrieks that rend the air/ Are made, not mark’d; where violent sorrow seems/A modern ecstasy; the dead man’s knell/Is there scarce ask’d for who; and good men’s lives/Expire before the flowers in their caps,/Dying or ere they sicken. (Macbeth, Act 4, Scene 3)

So how do you do that? How do you activate this intention so clear in the text, this world made unnatural and wrong? Creepy set pieces? Cool lightning effects? The re-purposing of a multi-story hotel in downtown New York for a site-specific ambulatory choose-your-own-adventure movement piece? That is also a way to go. And that is, of course, exactly what the U.K. based company Punchdrunk has done.
If you wander down to 27th and 10th on the lower West side of Manhattan you might see a super sleek building with very little visible signage. Though this might be more subtle than most spaces in New York, you might think nothing of it, after all, what with the High Line and Chelsea Market, the Meat Packing district has gentrified to the point of respectability, and it’s probably just another boutique hotel with rooms that cost more than your South-Philly row home rent. But you would be wrong in that assumption, because in reality this is the McKittrick hotel, and to enter it is to go back in time and divorce yourself from reality. The entire building has been transformed into an installation/performance space, created just to house this rumination/disintegration/distillation of Macbeth (among other things), the magnificent Sleep No More.

Upon arrival, the hotel’s guests (that’s us) are greeted and, just like any good hotel, we give up our bags and coats and enjoy a nice refreshment while our rooms are being prepared. In the smoky sexy Manderlay (heh) bar, tinted in shades of jungle red, jazz singers croon, and a kind if creepy gentleman in a tux calls out to groups of people, delineated by playing cards, and herds them into the entrance in shifts. Once admitted into the curtained room, a ravishing creature named Faye and a kindly porter whose name I didn’t catch let us know the rules of this game. Number one, no talking. Number two, you get a mask. Wear it at all times. (They aren’t messing about with this one, I saw a woman be made to leave because the mask was just too much for her.) Number three, treat the performers like strippers, look but don’t touch. And don’t be surprised if they don’t follow the same rules as you do. And number four? Whatever you expect, this isn’t going to be that.

And then, like children in a playground, we are let loose to do what we will. Stumbling out of the elevator in phantom masks the audience quickly scatters in search of people to watch, and finds itself in a shadowed world of infinite possibilities. Rooms curl up into rooms, hallways lead in every direction, windows and mirrors magnify the space, and you feel like just maybe this hotel goes on forever. Taxidermied animals stare at you from glassy ghoulish eyes. Lamps sputter and flutter, doors open into labyrinths of spaces, filled with containers and hidden places. Letters and objects and curiosities are scattered over this terrarium of a world, each one of them rife with significance and careful detail, playthings for the mind. Designed by director Feliz Barrett along with Livi Vaughan and Beatrice Minns, this massively scaled set is most astonishing in its scale and depth, like a doll’s house for big kids, it envelopes its audience and it’s performers, submerging us so deep in this gorgeously planned environment that we feel a part of a noir-film mixed with a gothic drama mixed with the most elaborate junk-shop in the world. Plus there is a cemetery in there somewhere. And a forest. And a mental institution. And, of course, a hotel.

Given that this production has been running for over a year now there are a plethora of blogs, reviews and nosy friends and acquaintances (like…me) who will tell you what to do once you are released into the belly of the beast. I can only speak, of course, to my own experience, and let you know what it is I did when I arrived at the McKittrick Hotel. Just like the National Gallery in Punchdrunk’s hometown, London, there is too much there for any one person to see in three hours (I would have said the Lourve, but a compliment to the French is an insult to the English). So a big part of the experience becomes about the intersection of chance and choice. If you follow one of the lithe and mesmerizing movers who haunt the hallways and rooms you will be missing the others. You can’t do everything at once, and you aren’t going to catch every story out there. You will probably get extremely lucky at least once. You will definitely miss some unbearably amazing things. But your experience will be your own, and it will be mind blowingly well crafted by a group of insanely talented people, helmed by directors Barrett and Maxine Doyle. So I’m just going to tell you what I did when I got in there, and you can take it or leave it. But whatever you do, if you can, go see it. Because it is the essence of Macbeth, the root of this twisted tale, a heart-pounding journey through his reign of terror that reaches into this story and pulls out the heart and the guts. What it lacks in text, of which there is little, it makes up for in everything else.

I myself began my masked journey in a hallway filled with creaking floorboards and ghostly lamps (all lighting by Barrett and Euan Maybank). Alone, abandoned by my fellow audience members,  I passed through rooms of smiling dead animals and dusty mirrors, and into a back-alley bar whose walls were made of cardboard and whose floor was covered in woodchips. I watched the bartender perform a dance on the pool table, and followed a blonde woman as she encased a scrap of a book and some lavender in a locket. A spell? Was she a witch? As she strode out to followed her, and saw her scare a very pregnant Lady Macduff half to death. As I have always loved the women of Macbeth, I followed her surprisingly fast waddle up the stairs and into a hotel lobby, where she is met by a sassy bellhop and a stern-faced housekeeper, who simply must be a reference to the menacing housekeeper of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, one of the many other stories woven into this tale, and not the first Hitchcock reference you can find at the McKittrick.

The evening passes in a swirl of dark corners, swinging lights and unbearably gorgeous movement. I watch Lady Macduff, bewitched by a tonic and dancing up the cabinets (which is not recommended for a woman in her condition). I follow her and she takes delight in making me scream with surprise. She joins her husband demurely at a banquet, which, as it turns out, will re-occur three times over the course of the evening. Like a video game or a dvd, the story reaches a point and then re-sets, giving you three chances to try and witness as much as possible. It’s a source of delicious anxiety, blink and a performer will be gone, down the stairs or around the corner, and if you sprint you just might be able to stay with them, panting behind your mask. I see a sparkling party with guests decked out in 40′s style glamour (Costume design by David Israel Reynoso). I see Banquo’s ghost haunting Macbeth in slow motion. I see Lady Macbeth, bloody and destroyed, bathing naked in the mental institution and muttering about the Thane of Fife having a wife. I see the Macbeths in their bedroom, both opulent and stark, and their achingly sexy reunion in dance. I see Duncan’s death, timed immaculately to the tick of a metronome. I spend some time in the suite of the Macduffs, in a spectacular and intimate scene that gives this couple a rich and troubling backstory, all to the tune of A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square , (sound design by Stephen Dobbie) a song that haunts the show just like it haunts Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt. I almost pull something dashing after Malcom, who only gives his faithful followers a breather when he stops to observe the Latin inscribed on a vivid pane of stained glass, “Ulula cum lupis, cum quibus esse cupis” (He who keeps company with wolves will soon learn to howl). I elbow other people, I stand in front, I make it my business to see what I want to see and damn the rest (it’s honestly the most New York thing about this production, how dreadful you have to be to your fellow audience members).  I thank goodness for the mask covering my mouth, because I don’t want everyone to see that I spend three hours with it open, gasping and murmuring the occasional “oh hell yes”.  And when the piece comes down to its final, inevitable and yet still stunning conclusion, and we hear the familiar crooning ballad sweetly singing:

“The moon that lingered over Londontown
Poor puzzled moon, he wore a frown.
How could he know that we two were so in love?
The whole darn world seemed upside down.”

We are arrested by the sight of Macbeth’s body, swinging, limp and heavy in the harsh clean light.

Yeah. Try sleeping after that.

The beauty of the scale and ambition of this work lies in its completeness. Everything is open to us, everything is available to us, you can touch anything in any room, read any letter, peak directly into any well-crafted narrative and observe. This piece gives us infinite choices, but each one of those choices is determined. And that, in essence, is what truly great theater does, it presents the illusion of free will in a complete universe that is so well crafted we believe we are actually making decisions, instead of having all of them made for us. You can choose every aspect of your experience in Sleep No More, you can follow a character, stay in a room, explore the elevator system, read the letters scattered like leaves, open drawers, dance, stay still, you can do whatever you want. And, just like a good hotel,  all of your desires have been anticipated, and therefore, prepared for. The experience is so total, so complete, that you feel both completely in control and like everything is beyond you. It’s a magnificent, frustrating, fabulous feeling. It’s what performance should be doing for us all the time, not, perhaps, in the same way, or in the same format, but with the same spirit of detail, ambition, skill, and care. Because this event takes care of its audience. It scares us, it delights us, it perturbs and intimidates us, but we are its focus, we are incorporated into it,  and as a result we feel welcomed, amazed, grateful and special. Regardless of who we follow or what narrative we witness, they feel like ours. It is an inherently generous piece of theater, and as such, we cannot help but enjoy our stay.

Because there are no programs or curtain calls, I have no idea who was who, but given that these performers were all equally incredible, engaging and spellbinding, maybe it doesn’t matter. So I will simply list the tremendous cast here, because I have no other recourse. (Is this a British thing?) Sleep No More  is performed by Phil Atkins, Careena Melia, Jordan Morley, Gabriel Forestieri, Eric Bradley, Elizabeth Romanski, Nick Atkinson, Sophie Bortolussi, Stephanie Eaton, Jeffery Lyon, Maya Lubinsky, Luke Murphy, Lucy York, Nicholas Bruder, Marla Phelan, John Sorensen-Jolink, Ted Johnson, Danielle Grabianowski, Christopher Higgins, Conor Doyle, Tori Sparks, Kelly Bartnik, William Popp, Paul Singh, Adam Scher, Dave Bryant, Ching-I Chang, Annie Goodchild, Hope Davis, Django Carranza, Isadora Wolfe and Matthew Oaks.

Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More will be running until the end of January. Tickets are available here.

But luckily for the children of the tri-state area, People’s Light and Theatre Company is currently presenting their winter Panto, Treasure Island, and if it’s not the most elevated of musicals at least it’s fun as heck (I would use stronger language, but think of the children!). Extremely loosely based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic tale of pirates and adventures on the high seas (where are the low seas, exactly?) this musical mayhem switches the gender of the main character, switching James “Jim” Hawkins to a Jaime (Rachel Brennan), a plucky young lass with a yen to see the world and a treasure map in her pocket. Joining her on deck is a colorful cast of characters including the befuddled Squire Treelawnee (Tom Teti), his insufferable daughter Evelyn (Susan McKey), the good Doctor Livesee (Michael Doherty) and the incomprehensible Captain Smilenot (Pete Pryor,who also directed the work).  Of course, this lively group of treasure seeking adventurers doesn’t count on their humble crew turning out to be a pirate gang led by the dreaded Long John Silver (Richard Ruiz) and his parrot, Polly (Amadea Martino Smith), nor does Jaime expect her own mother (Mark Lazar, cross-dressing in a series of ever-more-impossible wigs) to jump in as a stowaway. But adventures lie in the unexpected, now, don’t they? After all, no one, not even those familiar with this popular children’s story, would have assumed that the motley crew would find themselves shipwrecked on an island in the Caribbean and transformed, with the help of a vaguely objectionable “native”, Mama Kura (Joilet Harris) into love-grubbing money-scorning human beings. In fact, the actual story itself is often seen as morally ambiguous and more then a little violent. Thank goodness we now live in kinder, gentler times.

But all jokes aside, the idea of love being more important then money is a lovely one to teach our children, especially in these financially strained times. And equally lovely is this goofy and re-vamped tale, told with music, enthusiasm, and no shortage of puns. Played expansively in the company’s Mainstage space, the brightly colored fully rotating set, designed by James F. Pyne, Jr, lacks all subtly, and that’s a good thing. Complete with swinging ropes and mobile broom closets, and framed in a handsome “gold” plated Proscenium arch, the aesthetic of the piece screams picture-book. No doubt this effect is heightened and refined by Rosemarie E. McKelvey’s brightly jaunty costumes, which coat the pirate crew (Justain Jain, Chris Faith, Andrew Kane and Jefferson Haynes, all game as anything) in rough and ready gear, but never resist a cheap laugh in the form of novelty boxer shorts or red and white stripped bloomers. Frankly, with this kind of show, bloomers of any kind are to be encouraged. And all of this is lit neatly under the benevolent beams of Thom Weaver’s lighting plot and scored with original music and and lyrics by Michael Ogborn, played cheerfully and well by pianist John Daniels.

It’s a pirate tale, so naturally there is fighting (courtesy of fight choreographer and assistant director Samantha Bellomo), flirting, and no shortage of arrgghhhs. Argh, as it turns out, can mean just about anything at all! This show isn’t short on education, in that respect, or audience participation, and while that might exhaust older patrons who feel themselves above the occasional group dance lesson or candy give-away, the truth is that entering into the silly spirit of things is where all the fun lies. And the large and talented cast do their audience the great service of entering fully into the material, as wacky as writer Kathryn Petersen’s script might be, and maintaining a respect for their young audience that is pivotal to making this style work. Brennan’s smart and sassy Jamie belts through her musical lines with skill and charm, and keeps the story moving as the lone straight woman in a room full of crazy people, and the culmination of her romance with Doherty’s Gumby-like Dr. Livesee is sweetly triumphant for both parties. McKey’s perfectly snooty Evelyn and Pryor’s dopey Smilenot charm with their slapstick, while Lazar’s Mother Hawkins and Teti’s Squire Treelawnee could be performing at the Catskills with their vaguely dirty jokes and wry enjoyment of their own humiliation. But of course, this is a buccaneer’s story, and the true credit of the piece goes to the pirates themselves, Ruiz’s dastardly Long John Silver, laughing with villainous glee over his treachery, and his crew of twirling, spinning, jumping and leaping pirates, especially Jain, who does everything the other guys do, but with one hand! Yes, the life of a pirate can be a risky one, with limbs and teeth sacrificed to sharks and scurvy, respectively, but hey, at least you have fun doing it, right? And this piece is, above all, fun, fun for the audience, and, one hopes, fun for the actors who expend so much energy doing it.

There is something to be said for a piece of performance that is exactly what it purports itself to be. It may not surprise us, or deceive us, but it still has the capacity to delight us. Especially those of us who, bedtime or no,  still dream of pirates and treasures and adventures around the world. People’s Light and Theatre Company’s Treasure Island runs from now until January 8th, 2012. Tickets are available here.

And the boys of Jordan Harrison’s Act A Lady, now being presented by Azuka Theatre, are anything but heteronormative. First of all, they defy gender stereotypes from the very top of the show in their desperate desire to put on a play, and worse, a play with cross dressing involved. Denizens of a tiny town in Nowwheresville, Bible Belt, 1927, Miles (Mike Bees), True (Matt Tallman) and Casper (Jamison Foreman) are united by their desire to be “fancymen” in ribbons and bows. Well, we all knew the Midwest was starved for entertainment. And while Miles’ staunchly Christian wife Dorothy (Leah Walton) is loath to be involved this “clove foot casserole”, she agrees to let her husband dress up and act out, with the smug self-assurance that Miles will eventually come to his senses and recant his theatrical loving ways. Little does Dot know that Miles et al have fallen under the spell of the radical new director in town, Zina (Amanda Schoonover) whose name and nature echo that of a certain warrior princess, and she is going to make this production a success if it kills her. And with the help of her plucky make-up artist Lorna (Megan Slater) she just might pull it off. Of course, it’s going to take some gender confusion and some corsets, but that’s pretty par for the course for the theater, right?

Staged in the brand new and wonderful space at First Baptist Church, this production moves along like one of sound designer Daniel Perelstein’s carefully chosen Jazz Age tunes, catchy and neat, with a wink and a smile. Meghan Jones’ efficient and versatile set design shifts from 18th Century French Drawing room to backstage at a Midwestern Theater with the help of well used curtains and lovingly painted backdrops. Joshua Schulman’s effective lighting design makes multiple locations out of one stage, and draws shadows on the red background in the best traditions of vaudeville. And Alisa Sickora Kleckner’s costumes are beautifully designed, if a touch anachronistic (40′s style trousers in the 20s? How very progressive).

Harrison’s text is both verbally clever and structurally flawed. With whip-smart dialogue and breathless humor his characters are sharply drawn and sweetly sympathetic. Of course, they also have the benefit of a truly excellent cast and clean smart direction by Kevin Glaccum, who keeps the piece moving along at a rhythm that glides over the issues and features the intelligence. Mike Dees’ impossibly tall Miles is fantastic, funny, floppy, fabulous in calico and silk. And he has met his match in Leah Walton’s perfectly timed and hard-as-nails Dorothy, who, beneath all the bluster about Jesus, is the most profound of them all, stating with clarity “That is art. When you think you know how to see something but in the end you see something else”. With her pantaloons and menswear vest, Schoonover’s deliciously snappy and dramatic Zina strides around the stage like the 20′s film director from Singing In The Rain, holding onto her sanity through sheer willpower and a flask of gin. She mentors Foreman’s endearing young Casper through his sexual crisis (he’s a friend of Dorothy’s long before The Wizard Of Oz had even been released) and inspires Tallman’s gruff yet charming True, though of course that may have more to do with Slater’s charming but rather flat Lorna. Shifting neatly between roles and genders and enacting the ludicrous and loony play-within-a-play (a Moliere parody filled with ghosts, girls and ghastly revelations) with humor and skill. It’s just a shame that the play itself falls apart a bit in the middle, and it’s efforts to resurrect itself in the final moments of the piece are touching but not quite as redemptive as we might hope.

Harrison’s intentions with this piece are very clear, and so are the ways in which they fail. The play explores the idea of gender as learned, as social construct rather than innate understanding. With exchanges like:

Can a lady act a lady?

It’s something you learn, like everything else.

As the play progresses, the playwright tries to make a gradual shift within the piece, having the male actors unable to separate themselves from their female counterparts, and putting the women in trousers and calling them men. As the men delve deeper and deeper into their onstage personas, they project a separate masculine self, embodied by the female actors. But the end result is confusing rather than mind-bending, and it slows the natural flow of the story by entrenching us in the melodrama of the French farce and depriving us of information about the characters who really matter to us, those in the “present day” of a 20′s era town. We recognize that theater is being used as the lens through which we can view sexuality and society, that beauty is being questioned and examined by the layers of artifice encoded into drama, all of that is more than clear. But it’s not executed well enough within the text to be as meaningful as it wants to be, and no matter what this excellent production does, it can’t fix the story itself.

But ignoring all the issues, this is a tart and clever ode to the power of theater to improve our lives and take us places we’ve never been before, be it another country or the body of another person. And couldn’t we all use to be transported every once in a while, shown a different perspective, see the world through someone else’s eyes? And if those eyes are wearing a thick coat of mascara, well, so much the better, right? Man, woman or child, we can all use to feel pretty every once in a while.

Azuka Theatre’s production of Act A Lady is playing through the 20th of November. Tickets are available here.

At least, they wont in Brat Production’s new play, Meanwhile…, a quick change romp through 30′s Atlantic City featuring two versitile actresses playing what seems like over 30 roles. The story is laughably complicated, and painted in such broad strokes that it’s not worth a great deal of detail. Suffice to say that it starts in the office of John Sharp (Mary McCool) a streetwise detective with a soft spot for dames who are sweet on the eye. Sugar (Sarah Doherty) is a girl with a problem. They ought to be a match made in heaven, right? But of course Sugar is an aspiring singer at a local club, run by a scheming fading beauty who dreams of bigger and better things. A sassy bellboy, several aging gangsters (one complete with tall blonde moll), a wacky drummer,  a female detective (or dick, as we are reminded ad nauseum) and many many country folk complete this cast of cartoonish characters. Can John Sharp solve the mystery of the missing box? Will he give in to his baser urges and ravish the ravishing young Sugar (who is literally just asking for it)? And what exactly is Sugar herself hiding? You don’t have to concern yourself, because all of these questions, and more, are answered over the course of this two-hour farce.

With skill and inexhaustible energy these two actresses navigate their way through  Madi Distefano’s happily chaotic script. McCool valiantly deals with the plethora of penis jokes and transitions neatly from sassy Puerto Rican maid chock-full of melodrama to experienced dick (see what I mean?) on the beat, while Doherty struts and frets her hours on the stage with piercing focus and neat timing.  Together these two ladies work to make the script’s redundencies fresh and lively and fight the stagnancy of the story with every tool in their varied arsenals. And if the play still drags and inflates itself with dead air on occasion, at least Lee Ann Etzold’s direction works to fight that tendency. The trick about a quick change show is that it depends on repetition, on consistency, and on the audience being continually amazed by what’s happening on stage. But this production relies on the same four or five gags over and over again, ignoring the possibity of subtle humor in favor of blatant blustering. And as a result the novelty wears off the concept rather too quickly, leaving us, and our two heroines/heroes, stuck with at least an hour more of exposition, contrivance and costume changes.

Staged in the increasingly used RUBA club, under the glow of the curvy golden proscenium arch, Brad Helm’s set design works well with the “quick and dirty” nature of the play itself, transforming quickly between locations and drawing a concealing curtain whenever necessary. Bobby Fabulous’ luscious and ludicrous costumes could not be more appropriate for this piece, swirling around the stage in shades of navy, magenta, pearl and maroon, coating the ladies of the show in rich and sumptuous gear and giving the gentleman well tailored togs. Paul Moffit’s lighting paints the stage in various shades of Noir-style shadows wile Andrew Nelson’s sound design and composition scores the piece with vintage appeal and gives Doherty a hilariously archaic beautifully jazzy solo song, which she executes like the star she plays, on the cusp of greatness, if only it weren’t for all those pesky murders happening all around her.

For all it’s issues, this play is sheer fun, especially if you view it with a drink or two in your hand. And luckily the show itself happens in a bar, affording it’s audience ample opportunities to booze it up and celebrate the fact that we no longer live in an age of prohibition. And it’s worth watching for the sheer pleasure of seeing these two excellent performers enjoy each other and sell every joke like Willie Loman on Speed. Besides, when was the last time you saw a good Noir-Atlantic-City-Female-Detective-Crime-Caper? Yeah. That’s what I thought.

Brat Production’s production of Meanwhile...is playing until November 19th. Tickets are available here.

And so it is fitting that Subcircle’s latest carefully crafted creation, Seed, developed over the course of more than a year of cross-country cross continent exchanges between Niki Cousineau, Gin MacCallum, and New Zealand based choreographer Carol Brown, feels like a bird’s collection of objects, movements, text and music gathered from sources far and wide. The piece begins with the dissection of a bird, black and mangled with death. Cousineau neatly and efficiently slices into its sternum and removes objects from its abdomen, a ribbon, a piece of shell, bits and bobs. She lays them on the dissection table and writes a note beneath each one. The clinically precise actions of her rubber-clad hands are projected onto the wide rectangle set above the antique specimen cases and chairs that make up Jorge Cousineau’s warm toned set. As she draws out pieces of the bird’s final days, MacCallum, a bird herself with fragile limbs and constant motion, begins to get in her way, repossessing the items, flinging her body onto Cousineau’s, forcing her to join in the dance. As soon as she does, the piece begins to whirl.

Neatly bordered with titles projected above the dance space, the work becomes a series of vignettes, or sketches. Now it’s a tango between two “bird-women” in clompy heels and head scarves, scored in accordion with flourishes and sharp beats (original music by Rosie Langabeer, Russell Scoones and Jorge Cousineau). Then it’s a duet between a “man” and a woman, with each dancer trading roles and blazers. Then it’s a quietly tragic solo, with MacCallum as a squashed and naked baby-bird, exposed to the world and shadowed in Peter Escalada-Mastick’s lighting design. Each segment moves as an exploration, a thorough examination of space and time, and the other dancer in the room. The piece also serves to highlight the contrast between these two dancers. Both embody different aspects of “bird”, specifically tui or parson bird, whose sculptured image is provided by Michael Mullen.  But while MacCallum is frail, delicate, picking through the space with the agility of a sparrow, Cousineau is precise, powerful, a bird of prey intent upon her next meal. Together they swoop and spin around each other, crawling over chairs and a table, trapped within the specimen case, and at one point, with the ad of a stylish vintage coat suspended from the ceiling, Cousineau even gets to fly. The dancers are both magnificent, gorgeous in their harmony and their conflict, balanced in form and style, virtuosic and mesmerizing. Even when the piece feels beyond the grasp of the viewer, the dancers themselves are continually present, generous and strong. Cousineau is especially masterful in this piece, stunning in her power and her authority onstage.

Under Brown’s direction, this piece still bares the marks of Subcircle’s style, but with a distinctly different totality. Instead of a distinct narrative, the sense of a journey, this work feels more like images in a kaleidoscope, or the view from the window of the Maglev train in Shanghai, a series of moments strung together tenuously, luminous sections sandwiched between shifting transitions. What we are left with, then, is not an arrival at a destination, but a beautiful collection, unrelated, except by their proximity. Like the objects from the stomach of our avian friend we have gathered, or been given, little bits and pieces that are now ours to take home, lay out, and consider. Unless, of course, some bird comes along and steals them away.

Subcircle‘s Seed has finished its brief first run, but with any luck it will be performed again, soon, and it will grow and develop with each presentation, like a nest. Find out more about the piece and the company here.

So who can blame the Sephardic population of Holland in the 17th century for being both optimistic and wary? After all, they had fled sunny Portugal for a land of wooden shoes, dykes and heavy dumplings, leaving behind everything they knew to take a tentative asylum in a country that accepted them for their wealth and assurance that they would keep their heads down and not cause any trouble. Which can be difficult in a world where simply being Jewish is perceived as causing trouble. But the Sephardic community was in fact making it work, they had accepted their new life in a Christian country (fun fact for any gentiles out there, Sephardic actually means a Jew living in a Muslim nation, and Ashkenazi means a Jew living in a Christian nation), they had built a lovely synagogue (which is actually situated not far from the Red Light district, so if you visit today you can get your dose of negotiable affection and catch up on your Talmudic studies, all within walking distance!) and they were, for the most part, making new lives for themselves, under the benevolent eye of HaShem. That is, up until a hip Jewish radical simply had to stir the pot. The last time that happened some people hailed him as the Messiah. This time. Baruch de Spinoza wasn’t quite as lucky (or he was quite a bit luckier, depending on your view of things). Instead, Baruch (blessed, or blessing in English) found himself ostracized from his people, accused of denying his faith, and vilified among the Dutch community. He would end his life at the tender age of 44, dying from tuberculosis (possible) exacerbated by his career as a lens grinder. He would later be hailed as one of the most revolutionary and influential philosophers of the last 500 years, a true modernist, and a “prince among philosophers”. Not bad for a nice Jewish boy.

But the famous philosopher, the global influencer, the historic figure, is not the subject of David Ives play,New Jerusalem, The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza at Talmud Torah Congregation: Amsterdam, July 27, 1656 (try saying that five times fast), now playing at the Lantern Theater Company. No, it is the young Spinoza, the dreamer, the romantic, the eager student of Talmud and Torah just on the peak of his major philosophical theorems that would later be the subject of his highly controversal Ethics, challenging Descartes (and quite a bit more) who is the Spinoza we see in this absorbing if imperfect play. As Spinoza himself (Sam Henderson) reminds us, “all good stories start with a Jew”. And so we have Baruch, Bento, to his friends, a 23-year-old, a callow youth, who, in his very existence, is a major threat to the entire Jewish community of Holland. Or at least, that’s what staunch and starchy Abraham van Valkenburgh (Seth Reichgott), an official in the city of Amsterdam, would have us believe. So concerned is he by Spinoza’s radical new theories about determinism and the nature of God, that he strong arms the chef rabbi, Saul Levi Mortera (David Bardeen) and the head of the Parnassim,  Gaspar Rodrigues Ben Israel (a meek and mild David Blatt) into conducting a trial to ensure that Spinoza is still walking the party line of good obedient Jews who live quietly, grateful for the Dutch hospitality. And if he isn’t? Well, cherem (excommunication is the closest translation but even that doesn’t really cover it) for him, then. Of course, “under cherem you lose your entire world, both this one and the next”, but that’s a small price to pay to keep the peace, right? And so, after an exhausting philosophical debate that pits the student against his beloved teacher, his cartoonishly shrewish sister Rachel (Kittson O’Neill whose nice work can’t counteract a badly written role) and his entire community, Spinoza is shown the door.

Because the trial took place in the Portuguese synagogue, set designer Nick Embree has clearly referenced the real space in his set design, mimicking the arc and alluding to its magnificent chandeliers with a few spare but effective fixtures. Together with Shon Causer’s lighting design the space takes on the patina of the era and hints at the world before electricity.  Maggie Baker’s well executed costumes hit just the right mix of historic shape and modern material and motion, letting O’Neill sweep and Henderson pace with equal ease. Nick Rye’s sound is minimal but appropriate, and the design of the production as a whole is coherent and does the job of letting the play live both within the past and as a modern debate, bringing it closer to the audience then a mere History play, helping it feel as relevent as it is.

This is not a particularly easy story to tell. For one thing, it has the capacity to quickly devolve into pedantic ramblings or esoteric philosophical jargon and references (Kant you just imagine?). For another thing, Spinoza’s theories are some of the most difficult and dense arguments to be vocalized in the last 500 years (seriously, compared to Spinoza, Nietzche is a breeze), so they pose a real challenge to life-long academics, let alone theater goers who only get two and a half hours to try to get their minds around “substance“. So if we feel live Ives’ play does Spinoza a disservice in failing to fully unpack his ideas or portray a true Rabbinical teaching session or even get a couple of central tenants of Judaism right (it’s hard not to laugh at a rabbi who talks about heaven and hell when Jews believe in neither) at least we can say that he does make dramatic and deeply compelling a story that could have been mind numbingly boring. Ives’ sharply comedic writing helps, of course, with wickedly smart lines like “After the elegant absurdity of being born a Jew, why would I accept the near absurdity of Christianity?”.

Of course, part of the credit how engaging this particular production is must go to Henderson’s fiery eyed and forceful portrayal of Baruch himself which maintains it’s integrity and strength and is so well crafted that we root for Spinoza, even as he digs his own grave, verbally speaking. It survives director Charles McMahon’s rather lackluster staging (the piece is set in a thrust but played almost primarily for only one of the three audience banks) and the fact that both female characters, O’Neill’s aforementioned Rachel Spinoza and Mary Tuomanen’s wide-eyed and sweetly tortured Clara van den Enden, are badly written and one-dimensional, and the fact that the character of Simon de Vries is a device at best, though nicely played by Jake Blouch. But the central relationship of the play, between Henderson’s Spinoza and Bardeen’s Rabbi Mortera, is enough to sustain it through its errors. And the triangle of tension between Reichgott’s appropriately infuriating van Valkenburgh and the two Jews is a continual reminder of the very real stakes involved in this very theoretically conversation. Because if the Jewish population of Holland wasn’t living under the benign sufferance of their Dutch overlords, if they weren’t constantly in the position of outsiders, citizens of other nations, a subversive threat to the Christian state in their very existence, then this would just have been a spirited conversation between two scholars. But the fear of unrest, of another genocide, another flight in the night, forces the hand of Mortera to stab his beloved student in the back. As Spinoza says, “The Jews can’t speak because we have agreed to be silent”.

Whatever you think of Spinoza, his theories, religious freedom, Judaism or the Dutch, this is a deeply fascinating examination of humanity, philosophy, and the fundamental beliefs that can unite and divide us across time and space. Plus, it’s got some great Jewish jokes, just in time for Chanukah. So it’s really a bargain. Did you expect anything less? The Lantern Theater Company’s production of New Jerusalem, The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza at Talmud Torah Congregation: Amsterdam, July 27, 1656 is now playing through the 12th of November. Pick up tickets here.